


Entropy

by Peachy_keen



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Penny POV, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:26:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23022451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peachy_keen/pseuds/Peachy_keen
Summary: Some things are clearer in the aftermath. Penny wishes they weren’t.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Julia Wicker
Comments: 7
Kudos: 105





	Entropy

None of them had seen Eliot cry. The closest he’d come had been the funeral, visibly choking down grief as he threw a peach of all things into the fire, gulping down the scent of it like a lifeline. Maybe it was.

And Jesus, who can know how Eliot feels? Penny can’t even hold himself together and he hadn’t known Quentin much longer than five minutes but all of them? They killed the Beast, they saved Fillory, they saved _magic_ together. They’ve all been in the fucking trenches since they met.

They all followed Quentin like idiots here in 40. _We’ll figure it out, we always do._ And somehow it _worked_ for them, kept them winning by the skin of their teeth every fucking time. He wanted to shake them all and scream. Following Quentin Coldwater only led to blood and misery, the only difference here was _they_ weren’t the ones paying for it yet.

It had been an easy lie to tell himself, at first.

But.

It’s so easy to look back and paint them all as fools, erase all their own mistakes and color the past with all of Quentin’s faults. With a new Quentin in front of him it was harder to hold on to.

And now, in the aftermath, it feels like they’ve lost their center.

But Eliot? Eliot lost his champion, maybe not the most fearsome, but the most unflinching, who would walk to the ends of the earth for him, who would face down any evil to keep him safe. Someone who did all those things and more for Eliot, and he never got to say goodbye.

Penny knew grief, more intimately than one person ever should, knew the look of it on other people, hell, _these_ people, the feel of it from the loss of someone barely acknowledged to the collapse of his whole damn world, degrees on a scale that had no upper limit. A ladder of pain and misery reaching up into the stars, any semblance of comfort or relief fading like oxygen the higher you ascended.

It never got easier. And it was Quentin. Not the brittle, angry Quentin of his world but a newer, more tempered version, with the softest, most wounded eyes he had ever seen. It jarred him more than he’d admit, to see the faults in his memory. How could he forget how much Quentin hurt all the damn time? Running from an agony so deep he tried to lock himself away, become the plaything of a monster _forever_.

None of the others seemed to see it, shocked that he would martyr himself so easily but honestly. How could they not _see_?

But he thinks, maybe, Eliot did. He always kept Quentin in the corner of his eye, like he was scared to be caught looking but couldn’t help himself.

He can’t help but play it over, Quentin, trying to hide in nobility and Eliot… _Second, second that, yes._

It was odd, how desperate he sounded.

 _The only way to make sure that it doesn’t is to do this the hard way_.

Quentin doesn’t take his eyes off Eliot as he says it and there’s obviously something beneath the words because Eliot starts to cave in on himself.

 _The quest taught us that it’s like that sometimes_.

Eliot looks like he’s been hit and Quentin won’t meet his eyes anymore.

There was something there he just can’t parse because Eliot drowns anything genuine in booze and Quentin tries to sacrifice himself because that’s what he does, and whatever he’s running from, this is easier.

He can see it, but the others don’t. Maybe because he was new, didn’t take for granted all the aching little subtleties of their behavior. Outsider’s perspective and all that.

It only got worse.

Quentin and Eliot in the penthouse, faces sprayed and hands dripping with the blood of who knows how many people. The defeated helplessness as what used to be Eliot muses about the importance of order, how he would be the last to die. Quentin, a rabbit caught in a snare, too exhausted to do anything but breathe before the end comes.

And the predator with Eliot’s face watches, fixated on Quentin’s eyes, drinking in the vulnerability and heartbreak like an intoxicating perfume.

That was how it started.

The fixation never leaves. It watches behind Eliot’s eyes, Quentin, always Quentin. It shows affection with soft words and smiles like bared fangs and the constant, ceaseless, neverending hands. In his hair, across his shoulders, petting his face, tracing the bones beneath his skin, gentle touches like razorblades that slice and slice and slice at Quentin until he’s a delicate, shivering mass held together by ever fraying threads.

But they don’t see it.

They orbit around him, focused on god power or crowns or the library. And he’s just as guilty, because, well, outsider’s perspective. For all that he’s known other versions of them and they’ve known other versions of him, in the end they’re still strangers. The flow between them all, the interpersonal dynamics, are an alien thing, filled with the weight of _too much_. Too much of the weight of worlds, crowns, and death of gods and magic and each other. They’re all so wrapped in the intimacies of their own pain that Quentin’s just... slips through.

Because on top of ruling kingdoms, hiding from the McAllistairs, goddess problems, and the mountain of interpersonal bullshit between them all, they have to kill a monster.

And Quentin has to keep Eliot alive.

So he stays with the monster and fights with his friends because _not if it kills Eliot, except for the part where it doesn’t save Eliot, anything that kills Eliot is off the table_ , and starts walking around with black handprints around his throat and they all miss it.

They miss it until they’re all sitting numb around the bonfire and there are no words and Eliot doesn’t cry.

Eliot, whose eyes had filled Quentin’s mind when he died. Even after the magic had cut through his wards and tore into his body the memory of a coronation filled his mind, somehow a shining, precious, private moment despite all their friends around them. The burning slice of grief cutting deeper than the sparks, knowing he’d never see those soft eyes again before Quentin is simply gone.

Quentin, who with every vestige of strength he had, threw himself at a monster again and again and again. Who pushed himself beyond his body and mind to kill a monster that stole Eliot’s eyes from him.

And once it was done, he couldn’t find the strength to run. A rabbit in a snare.

He knows, he _knows_ that if they had just been there, shouldered just a little more that Quentin might have lasted just a few heartbeats longer before the exhaustion swept away any will to fight. But instead they’d left him to the creeping hopelessness and trauma as he became a monster’s pet and Christ what was _wrong_ with them?

They’d all watched it obsessing over Quentin. Touching, watching, and tracing veins that it had split open in other people, dragging him along as it killed and killed and killed and Quentin disappearing for hours in the shower afterward. Coming in to him on the couch and it behind him looming, possessive.

Quentin had always felt small, perpetually hunched, curled inward around himself, his anxieties shrinking him down. Always trying to make himself invisible even as he pulled them all towards him, undeniably the center of whatever it is that they were. When Penny saw him as the Beast it had been surprising in more ways than one. Without the weight of his brain, Quentin was almost large, spine straight and broad shoulders filling out his suit and for the first time Penny started to understand the price of Quentin being well, _Quentin_. And dealing with the monster, Quentin had never been smaller.

And Eliot, Penny forgets, is larger than even he is, something that gets lost in the long, graceful, and, Penny had to admit, lovely lines of his body. With the monster it’s different. It’s huge enough to suck the oxygen from a room, and there was something _animal_ in how it held itself, turning the naturally luxurious movement of Eliot’s limbs to something jagged. A barely leashed, smoothed over violence became the defining characteristic of Eliot’s body.

 _If you are lying to me I will have you flayed_.

One of Eliot’s big hands covering the entire expanse of his throat and pressing with the strength of a god.

Thinks back to Quentin’s throat, the column a totality of black, painful looking bruises that he can’t possibly hide and wonders at all that could be covered by those hoodies he had started wearing. How after Penny had gone into the monster’s mind he’d been strong when he caught and carried him to the chair but thinner, much thinner than he should be, his shorter hair hitting at the sides of his face, disguising the ever more severe jut of his cheekbones.

It’s all so viciously obvious when he looks back.

Penny wonders what they’d see if they had a body.

He can envision it, Quentin small, drained, empty. Wonders what they’d see if they stripped him down. Would his ribs press through his skin? Were there cuts, slices they didn’t know about? Would there be more black bruises? On his stomach, his arms (his hips, his thighs)?

_(Quentin, limping, more dead-eyed than usual as they pass in the hallway and he locks himself in the shower for an hour longer than he ever has.)_

_(“I like Quentin, he’s pretty on the inside,” hands bloody up to it's elbows.)_

Eliot comes to him a week after the funeral (it’s too soon, he’s not ready, he may never be ready). He’s barefoot, linen pants that look faintly Fillorian slung low on his hips and a grey t-shirt that’s a touch too short on him (it’s Quentin’s, he knows it’s Quentin’s). They’re virtually strangers but it hurts to see him look this vulnerable, still unable to walk without a cane, less about the physical and more an emotional crutch. No one can tell him where it came from. Eliot never lets it go.

They’re all hurting in different ways but there’s something about Eliot, stripped of all his armor, no Margo to flutter over him after running off to Fillory, that strikes all the wrong chords in Penny, fires up the ugly, useless feeling he’s trying to push down.

He’s tried to focus on Julia, (he needs something, _anything_ ) but all she wants to work at is magic, and all he can see are her missing pieces. The thing he’d loved about his Julia was her joy. How she looked at this dark thing he carried inside himself and saw endless, wonderful possibilities. Magic was a thing of wonder and no matter how much he hated how naive she was, he couldn’t help but be pulled in, laughing together at beautiful, useless party tricks for hours.

To look at her now sits like a stone in his chest because he aches with what happened to her here to make her so strong. There is no wonder in magic, just a utilitarian, calculated need to know. She is steel while his had been golden, glittering and soft.

He can’t hate Jane Chatwin because here, she lived. But she’ll never really know the cost.

She’s eerily calm and he doesn’t like how it scrapes at his nerves. He thinks, maybe, she’s been preparing her whole life for this moment, ready for the inevitable day when her Q would simply decide to not _be_ anymore. She seems to take it all in stride and he can’t bring himself to understand.

Because he’s a wreck.

(He hates examining why.)

All he can feel is a shudder under his skin, it’s _constant_ and he thinks it might be the magic flowing through his veins and his body is following his brain’s desire to flinch away. Every time he reaches for it all he can see is blood and golden sparks.

He thinks he might still be in some kind of deep shock. Sometimes he’s blissfully numb, others his emotions beat at him so strongly he wishes he could tear out his shade. “ _Take this from me_ ,” hold it out in cupped hands like an offering to any dickbag god they haven’t killed yet, a self serving sacrifice on the altar of penance.

Sometimes he blips out. Materializes in the lab and how deeply fucked is it that the trauma he’s trying to run from brings him to the closest approximation of where it happened again and again. Sometimes he sees scorch marks on the walls.

He’s losing his fucking mind.

And with Eliot sitting across from him in the penthouse, he knows he has absolutely no right to it.

He looks at Eliot’s face and sees the deep, dark circles that they all share, somehow he knows they’ll never fade completely. A different kind of scar. He’s expressionless but the truth is there, in those shadows. The hurt is there, and if Eliot gives in to it for half a moment it’s over. But it must not be enough for him because it’s 3am and there’s only one thing Eliot can want from him.

“Tell me.”

There it is. It’s everything he’s been trying to avoid but he needs to find the words, pull himself together somehow. This isn’t something he can refuse.

He hates this. He wants to numb out, he wants to forget, he wants to go back to 23 to before a time when he had never heard of timeline _fucking_ 40.

These aren’t his _people_ so _god why does it hurt so goddamn bad_?

“Why are you asking me man?” He can hear the pleading in his voice and can’t find the energy to hate it.

It’s a long moment before Eliot answers, eyes down, watching his fingers stroke at the textured ram’s heads of his cane. There’s an exhale that empties his lungs before he braces himself, steeling his spine like if he could just _get through this_ , maybe it’ll hurt a little less.

It won’t.

“Because I can trust you not to spare me.”

It’s like the monster ripped the heart out of his chest.

God all he feels is hollow.

He doesn't know how to be with Eliot, just Eliot. Doesn’t know anything beyond the basics and what he’s been able to glean from everyone else. The only time he’d ever really interacted with him was in 23 when he was dragging Quentin away from Julia, which _thank god_ , but he doesn’t really know Eliot at all. He’d only ever picked up snippets of him when they happened to be at the same party and Eliot got so fucked up his wards started to fuzz out.

Now, sitting with Eliot, this Eliot, who’s asking him to detail the last few months he can’t help wishing for some knowledge of the man in front of him because no matter what he does he is going to cause some brutal fucking hurt with no idea how to gentle it.

How can he sit with Quentin’s… god he doesn’t know. His _something_. There are no words for how Quentin felt about Eliot. He only had the briefest glimpse but it was enough. A love fierce enough to let the world burn, a heartbreak and bitterness that only stoked it _higher_. It defined Quentin, a feeling he gave, pouring it out of himself until there was nothing left, just red mist in the mirror world.

Maybe the monster had seen it. Maybe it had known. Because Quentin was simply _Eliot’s_ and if he was Eliot’s Quentin then he could never be the monster’s. _(Is that the reason? Was it all a punishment?)_

He sees his face and _knows_ , god just knows that unfathomable feeling Quentin had for Eliot, Eliot has it too.

The realization knifes through him and god how much pain is he expected to carry? His, Julia’s, Quentin’s, Eliot’s, when is it _enough_?

Is this all they are? Thirty-nine timelines of pain and loss and it still wasn’t enough. Are they all destined to die too early, to lose each other too soon? Time murders them all but they can never seem to get enough of it. The universe is a cast iron bitch and she refuses to just let them _live_. It’s the easiest thing, to have compassion, but gods don’t feel.

Of course they’re in charge.

There are no words for any of it. How could you take all of what had happened, distill it down, and detail, unsparingly, how they’d all failed for _months_?

The horrifying suspicions of what went on underneath all of their noses, that Quentin never tried to hide but none of them had the barest fucking decency to see? What he thinks the monster used Eliot’s body for? That only now with the lens of their new reality can he see how monstrously unforgivable they all are? The obscenity of the monster using _Eliot_ to abuse him? How he owes it to Eliot (to Quentin) to pull from his memory every overlooked flinch and hitch of pain and _agonize_ over every second they left Quentin so, _so_ alone at the mercy of a thing that could only ever be called a monster.

How he wonders if it was inevitable, some divine fucking intervention because what if this is the price? They’ve won again and again, saving magic and Fillory and who knows how many people, is this the cost? They reign in the chaos and it destroys them in turn? Fucking _entropy_? They pay in tears and hurt and fucking rivers of their own blood because nothing in this godsdamn universe is free.

He breathes.

It feels like razorblades.

“We forgot to save him.”

Because Quentin was the strong one, the brave one, the one who rescued them over and over. He’d saved them all, and they forgot to remember that _they_ might need to save _him_.

Penny lets it all spill out of him. All the guilt, recriminations, fear, blood, pain, regret, so, so much regret. He tears them all apart for what feels like hours until his voice is hoarse and his eyes are hot with tears for Quentin fucking Coldwater who deserved _better_.

All Eliot can do is watch, as Penny cries their tears for both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Holy crap you made it to the end.
> 
> So I have a lot of feelings and I can’t even tell if this makes sense anymore. Help? 
> 
> I love comments, I don’t write a lot so they really help me out, feel free to say whatever!


End file.
